Thursday, November 13, 2008

Birth Story Part One

My son is now five days old. Since Husband is holding him and he nursed recently, I am going to attempt to take the opportunity to write out his birth story. I am still kind of processing it, so bear with me.

Friday November 7th I woke up at 12:30am with diarrhea and cramping. By 1:00 am I realized it was labor and was different from my previous contractions. I went back to bed in an attempt to sleep and prepare for what was to come. At 2:30 am I finally decided to alert Husband and asked him to go downstairs to get my watch and time the contractions. They were 4 minutes apart and lasting about 45 seconds. I gave up the sleeping in bed theory and went downstairs to watch some DVDs and relax. I told Husband to go back to sleep because I needed him as rested as possible... it served no purpose to have both of us exhausted. I had no choice as to whether or not I could sleep, but he did and needed to take advantage of it while he could and I would wake him when I needed him.

Somewhere around 5 or 6 I popped in the tub for a while. I figured if a hot bath stopped the labor, then it was obviously more false labor. After 30 minutes and about 5 contractions, I confirmed to myself it was the real thing. Knowing my mom was up and getting ready for work, I went next door and told her she could go into work if she wanted, but I may be calling her to come home early. She decided to go, but was on high alert.

By this time I had already been in labor for nearly seven hours. Things were progressing, but still nothing that made me feel I needed to go to the hospital, wake Husband or call my doula. I did, however, decide to eat and made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat toast.

I already had an appointment with my OB scheduled for 1:45 pm (the appointment was to discuss induction) so I called to cancel the appointment and told them that I was in active labor and would call when I felt I needed to go to the hospital. They talked me into coming in anyway. In addition to Husband, our doula and my mom accompanied me to my appointment since we were all pretty much assuming I'd be sent straight to the hospital. And I was. He checked me and said I was abot 5 cm dilated and called the hospital to make all the arrangements and let his partner, who was the doctor on call, know I was coming up.

Since 5 cm isn't very much for someone hoping to avoid medical intervention, we all went to a local park and did laps around it for a while then got something to eat before heading to the hospital around 5:00 pm.